Conclusion

The final chapter summarizes the findings of this study on intertextual media references in conversations among Millennial friends in their late twenties and discusses how they contribute to our understanding of knowledge and identity in everyday conversation, as well as our understanding of Millennial identity construction in particular. The findings as related to further developing an interactional sociolinguistic (IS) approach to knowledge in discourse, including contextualization cues, intertextuality, and framing, are reviewed. The findings as related to the merging of intertextuality and epistemics and the findings as related to how epistemic and frame management relying on intertextual references contribute to group identity construction in discourse are reviewed and discussed. This chapter also considers individual identity as displayed through the use of media references in this study of Millennial identity construction.

“One of us”

While scholars have explored the importance of quoting media in accomplishing relationship and identity work in conversation, there is little work on how people actually phonetically and paralinguistically signal media references in the speech stream. This chapter demonstrates how speakers make 148 media references recognizable across five audio-recorded everyday conversations among Millennial friends in their late twenties. Five ways that media references are signaled in talk are identified: word stress and intonation, pitch shifts, smiling and laughter, performing stylized accents, and singing. This systematic analysis of the contextualization cues used to signal media references in everyday talk contributes to understanding how speakers participate in intertextual processes. This chapter also introduces how signaling playful media references often (but not always) serves to negotiate epistemic, or knowledge, imbalances as well as interactional dilemmas, or awkward and unpleasant moments in interaction; this will be explored in more detail in chapters 4 and 5. Also weaved in are analyses of the identity work being constructed with the media references, as well as of the media stereotypes that are repeated in some of them.

Teaching via Zoom: Emergent Discourse Practices and Complex Footings in the Online/Offline Classroom Interface

The COVID-19 pandemic caused educational institutions across the world to face a new reality: when teachers and students do not share the same physical space (fractured ecologies), drastic changes in the everyday procedures and routines of teaching become an immediate necessity. In this paper, we trace some of the effects of this new situation in online classes of three experienced university teachers in the early days of the pandemic. We zoom in on dimensions of the classroom interface such as: turn-taking procedures, socialization, peer scaffolding and feedback; strategic footing changes across institutional and conversational roles; joking and humor. Not surprisingly, we found that the systematic absence of multimodal contextualization cues like gaze direction and tracing the origin of sound/speech were a trouble source in these online multiparty settings. We also saw, however, that teachers and students were successful in reinventing themselves and in devising new ways to deal with the changed circumstances. We end the paper with a number of implications for research into the classroom interface, both online and offline.

A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves

The present paper provides a plausible interpretation of how a variety of literary elements and religious practices can augment our current understanding of ancient Orphism, although all of the sources seem to reflect a common religious function. The analysis is primarily based on close readings and deals with textual interpretation only as much as is necessary in order to highlight the intrinsic relations of textual constructions on the compositional, syntactical, and grammatical level. By focusing on structural relations, this syntactic approach enables us to integrate all the diverse emic interpretations on the basis of functional rules, while restraining us from the problem of interpreting surface meanings. The primary sources of the paper are specifically the A and D type Orphic gold leaves, because the structuring of these texts follows a common compositional pattern that seems to allude to a “model experience.” Using this “model experience” paradigm, this paper also aims to exceed the contemporary neo-ritualist interpretations of these texts as mere “ritual representations” and to propose a more holistic approach based on functionality. This is accomplished by separating formulaic components and treating them as contextualization cues which refer to the different stages that the initiate embodies, in an interdiscursive textual composition.

Zwischen den Welten: zur kognitiven und kommunikativen Ko-Konstruktion von Alteritätserfahrung

It is still hard to find the examination of real interaction from a cognitive, “embodied” and multimodal perspective in empirical practice, concurrently maintaining the operational framework of conversation analysis. The following article aims at showing how co-participants in talk-in-interaction co-construct intercultural experience multimodally, that is, on verbal, prosodic and gestural-corporal levels. Based on five sequences taken from the ICMI corpus of the research group Intercultural Communication in Multimodal Interactions, founded at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2010, it will be revealed how interactants narrate their intercultural experience based on reenactments, how (inter)cultural conceptualizations are (co-)built by means of iconic, metaphorical and beat gestures, by gaze, posture and body movements, as well as by prosodic cues such as pitch jumps and contours, accents, volume and tempo. Concurrently, all those means serve as contextualization cues to express the interlocutors’ involvement, stance, alignment as well as affiliation, and can be conceived as “points of access” to deeper entrenched schemata related to the participant’s (inter)cultural experiences. In this sense, the study aims to bridge the gap between conversational and interactional linguistics, on the one hand, and cognitive and cultural linguistics, on the other.

Between cultures

It is still hard to find the examination of real interatcion from a cognitive, ‘embodied’ and multimodal perspective in empirical practice, concurrently maintaining the operational framework of conversation analysis. The following article aims at showing how co-participants in talk-in-interaction co-construct intercultural experience multimodally, that is, on verbal, prosodic and gestural-corporal levels. Based on two sequences taken from the ICMI corpus of the research group Intercultural Communication in Multimodal Interactions, it will be revealed how (inter)cultural conceptualizations are (co-)built by means of iconic, metaphorical and beat gestures, by gaze, posture and body movements, as well as by prosodic cues such as pitch jumps and contours, accents, volume and tempo. Concurrently, all those means serve as contextualization cues to express the interlocutors’ involvement, stance, alignment, as well as affiliation, and can be conceived as ‘points of access’ to deeper entrenched schemata related to the participant’s (inter)cultural experiences. In this sense, the study aims to gap the bridge between conversational and interactional linguistics, on the one hand, and cognitive and cultural linguistics, on the other.

The performance of humor

This chapter introduces the third section of the book, dedicated to the performance of humor (as opposed to competence) or using another term to the sociopragmatics of humor. It starts out with a discussion of the performance of humor (in a theatrical sense), including standup comedy. The rest of the chapter presents the Hymes-Gumperz sociolinguistic model, which will guide the remaining chapters of the book. In particular the concepts of repertoire, speech acts and events, genres, and contextualization cues are explicated. The chapter is capped by a discussion of empirical studies on markers of humor performance.

The polyphonic pastor

The current study draws on insights from research on reported speech, or more accurately what Tannen (2007) calls “constructed dialogue” to elucidate its role as an argumentative device as observed in a journalistic interview with a prominent American minister. I explore diverse techniques the minister uses to marshal a multiplicity of respected voices – an impressive Bakhtinian polyphony – to defend faith. An important contribution of this study lies in its integration of what Gumperz (1977, 1982) calls “contextualization cues”, paralinguistic signaling mechanisms (stress, pitch, speech rate, etc.), and constructed dialogue as phenomena which function together. The study reveals how various contextualization cues embedded within constructed dialogue contribute to framing knowledge claims as reliable.

Linguistic strategies prompting interactions in recipes from Mandarin Chinese food blogs

This study investigates linguistic strategies used in recipes from Mandarin Chinese food blogs that prompt interactions between writers and readers. Using analytical concepts such as contextualization cues and frames to analyze 122 recipes collected from five popular food blogs in Taiwan, this study explicates two research questions. First, what linguistic strategies do writers frequently employ as contextualization cues to prompt interactions from readers? Second, how do these contextualization cues help readers choose frames when responding to writers? The findings show that writers of popular food blogs often adopt three linguistic strategies to engage readers’ discussions on recipes: narrative orientations, speech acts, and direct reported speech from family members. Three implications arise from interactions in the context of food blogs. First, writers usually adopt manifold contextualization cues to establish the frames of recipes intended by them. Second, the ways writers and readers use language to discuss food and create coherent discourses on food construct food blogs in Taiwan as an online community. Finally, recipes may reflect social phenomena, i.e. in Taiwan, more and more people, especially female caregivers in their families who are concerned about health, started to cook after serious breaches of food safety.

Framing and switches at the outset of qualitative research interviews

The article focuses on the opening sequences in qualitative research interviews and in particular examines the interactive work of achieving ‘topic talk’. Using the concepts of activity types, activity frames and contextualization cues, a close-up analysis of eight focus-group interviews and 12 semi-structured interviews was conducted. The findings show that the interviewees display familiarity with the interview as an activity type and how it is to be socially organized. However, to create a joint focus of attention, thereby getting off to an adequate start, the participants also need to agree upon an activity frame and a distribution of positions to achieve a frame switch, which here emerges through the interactional work of announcing, customizing and approving. Accordingly, by highlighting the communicative and practical circumstances of qualitative research interviewing, the opening sequences are considered to be a delicate interactive affair, however, where the interviewer has to take the main responsibility.